Category: Google

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Apple Google

Is Safari the new IE?

Duct Tape, fixer of all things!Nolan Lawson: “It’s tempting to interpret this as a deliberate effort by Apple to sabotage any threats to their App Store business model, but a conspiracy seems unlikely, since that part of the business mostly breaks even. Another possibility is that they’re just responding to the demands of iOS developers, which largely amount to 1) more native APIs and 2) Swift, Swift, Swift. But since Apple is pretty good at keeping a lid on their internal process, it’s anyone’s guess.”

The web is ever changing and evolving as is the mobile development community. Here we have a web developer that’s dying to take advantage of new technologies but is stymied by Apple’s lack of support for a set of open standards. Do I think this is deliberate on Apple’s part? Well, yes and no, but I don’t think it’s malicious. I think it’s a matter of priorities.

Compare and contrast Apple and Google. Apple is about creating and selling hardware with the best user experience it can possibly provide. That means investing in the native experience. On the other hand we have Google who is all about the web and web technologies. They spend their time investing in the web. It makes complete sense for both companies to invest in the thing they believe in. It’s part of their DNA. They can’t help but do what’s right for their respective platforms.

It is interesting to note Google forked WebKit into Blink a couple years back. You gotta wonder if Google believed Apple was moving too slowly when it came to standards adoption. It seems a reasonable conclusion.

I’d love to hear from Don Melton on the subject. Don was the guy that started the Safari and WebKit projects at Apple. He would know better than anyone why Apple is doing what they’re doing. Having worked on some large projects in my past life I feel pretty confident in saying it’s a matter of company priorities. Pretty simple really. You have to put resources where it makes sense for your company.

Apple will come around. They have to. The web will eventually mature to the point that it can compete with native applications. When that happens the browser will have to become the new operating system.

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Google

Google Reader: Power Users Lose

Jerry Fahrni: “When Google finds a new article on the web that contains one of my keywords it sends it to my Google Reader feed where they sit patiently until I’m ready to read them. This is a great way to find information that I would have otherwise missed.”

Most users of Google Reader are bemoaning the loss of sync between devices. There are already good choices for sync. That’s not the biggest problem for some Reader users. In the case of my brother, he’s a power user of the service. Google Reader isn’t just about RSS feed reading or syncing feeds and feed states across devices, it has advanced features that will not likely be replaced by other readers.

That’s the big loss for some.

A wonderful boquet of flowers.On the flip side it’s great for RSS feeds and feed services. As Dave Winer is fond of saying “Let a thousand flowers bloom!” Hopefully we’ll see a new sync API bloom from the mothballing of Reader.

Brent Simmons has started an RSS Sync Mailing List. It’s worth keeping an eye on.

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Google

End of Trust in Google?

Om Malik: “I spent about seven years of my online life on that service. I sent feedback, used it to annotate information and they killed it like a butcher slaughters a chicken. No conversation — dead. The service that drives more traffic than Google+ was sacrificed because it didn’t meet some vague corporate goals; users — many of them life long — be damned.”

Ditching Reader before announcing Keep has left people skeptical. I don’t blame them.

Does anyone remember Google Notebook? Didn’t think so.

Thank goodness we have Evernote.

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Google

Google I/O, too much work.

Jeffrey Zeldman: “So Google wrote to my zeldman.com address, which they won’t allow me to associate with my Google+ address, to invite me to start a Google+ account (which I already have) on my zeldman.com account, which they won’t support. And if I do that (which I can’t), and some other complicated stuff, they promise that I will then be able to participate in Google IO, whatever that is.”

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Apple Google

Is Apple Big Brother?

Alex Levinson: “I don’t think that’s a legal battle Apple wants to face considering the sale of over 100 million iDevices worldwide. That raises the question – how is this data used? It’s used all the time by software running on the phone. Built-In applications such as Maps and Camera use this geolocational data to operate. Apple provides an API for access to location awareness called Core Location.”

No, Apple isn’t “Big Brother”, that’s the government’s job. Go read the article, it’s very good, and gives you the truth about how the data is used, including this nice little nugget.

“Apple is not harvesting this data from your device. This is data on the device that you as the customer purchased and unless they can show concrete evidence supporting this claim – network traffic analysis of connections to Apple servers – I rebut this claim in full.”

Oh, and yes, Android devices do something similar.

If you have an iPhone and would like to create a map of the places you’ve been, there’s an app for that.

Categories
Google Mobile

One developers view of Android changes

Elia Freedman“This is a huge change for Google and one I applaud. The old model was just not tenable. No one — and I mean no one except carriers and those manipulating the OS for their nefarious gains — liked what was happening to Android. As developers it was too many minute changes on too many platforms. It wasn’t one Android, it was 5000 of them: Verizon’s Android, AT&T’s Android, HTC’s Android, Motorola’s Android, Samsung’s Android, etc. And as developers we had to pick and choose which Android we would support.”

I’d imagine the developers that are trying to make money on this platform will love the change. Maybe, just maybe, it’ll mean a more consistent experience.

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Apple Business Google iOS Mobile

Who wins?

A cute little monkey.tap tap tap: In the end, I think that both Apple’s and Google’s models will thrive and there won’t be a clear-cut winner. They’re ultimately two completely different markets, targeted toward two different kinds of users… and two different kinds of developers.

That’s a good way to look at it. There are those of us completely sold out to iOS and there are those sold out to Android.

We all win.

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Google Uncategorized

GoogleYork

Wired: “So down, in fact, that the web search titan just dropped $1.9 billion to acquire one of the largest and most historic buildings in all of the Big Apple. At nearly 3 million square feet, 111 Eighth Avenue, the former Port Authority building, sits like a beached, red-brick cruise ship overlooking New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. The building is so big, in fact, that it has elevators large enough to accommodate 18-wheel semi-trucks.”

What’s the Big G up to? There’s a lot of fiber running into the building. Makes you go hmmmm? Especially with the recent Net Neutrality announcement that called out Google Android. (Which made zero sense.)

Hey, LEVEL could use some new space, I wonder if we could sneak the entire company into the building without them noticing?

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Apple Google iPhone

Is Android less open than iPhone?

TechCrunch: “In theory, I’m right there with you. The thought of a truly open mobile operating system is very appealing. The problem is that in practice, that’s just simply not the reality of the situation. Maybe if Google had their way, the system would be truly open. But they don’t. Sadly, they have to deal with a very big roadblock: the carriers.”

Leave it to the carriers to ruin a good thing. As others have said, this could be one big reason Verizon doesn’t have the iPhone.

Categories
Google

Ok, the Go language is kind of broken

AHHHHHH!golang.org: “You should never put the opening brace of a control structure (if, for, switch, or select) on the next line. If you do, a semicolon will be inserted before the brace, which could cause unwanted effects. Write them like this”

Go should be easy for C/C++/Objective-C developers to pick up but why in the world would you make it retarded from the get go? Who’s screwball idea was it to require the opening brace to be on the same line? It’s like we’re coding in COBOL again. Oh, that’s right, Google is big into Python. I forgot.

I still find it odd that people stick to K&R style.